John Oliver Takes to ‘Sesame Street’ to Rile People Up About Lead Poisoning

Sunday night on Last Week Tonight, John Oliver took up the daunting task of clarifying the “bureaucratic clusterfuckery” that lead to the lead crisis in Flint, Michigan. Which is more of a challenge than you might think for a crisis that amounts to children being poisoned by drinking water and the paint in their homes. As usual, Oliver goes deep on the issue, though not without making some detours along the way to poke fun at The Police and America’s Frozen obsession (#LetLetItGoGo).

As Oliver explains it, lead has been an unambiguous danger to children for decades, so much so that we basically banned it from everything — our paint, our gas, our pipes — in the 1970s. But the problem is how to deal with the lead that we already have, and for that, the government is dragging their feet and refusing to allocate sufficient funds.

This is one of those problems that could be greatly helped if the public got good and fired up about it, and so to facilitate that and get the American people to give a damn, Oliver turned to the good Muppets on Sesame Street to help him make his point.

Even Oscar the Grouch gets it: “How can anyone say it’s too expensive? Aren’t they aware that in a study according to Environmental Health Perspectives that every dollar we spend on lead paint hazard control produces returns of at least seventeen to one?!” And he lives in a trash can!